Defeating the Tigers: The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka and How to Defeat a Successful Insurgency

For the past twenty years, the United States has been dealing with insurgencies, most prominently the one in Afghanistan. While the U.S. has conducted insurgency campaigns since the beginning of the 20th century in the Philippines, the United States still is unable to properly perform a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. While they have been successful in individual provinces and districts of nation-states they are involved in, some have opined that “poor outcomes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam before them are the result of a poor implementation of the U.S.’s counterinsurgency strategy” and that the U.S.’s COIN doctrine and policies are ineffective in combating insurgencies.